A Fast Obstacle Detection Method by Fusion of Double-Layer Region Growing Algorithm and Grid-SECOND Detector

Abstract

Adjacent obstacles are difficult to be distinguished, and remote obstacles are detected easily to split. Besides, limited deep learning samples easily result in missed detection of obstacles in urban environment. In view of this, a fast and robust detection method is proposed by fusing Double-Layer Region Growth algorithm and Grid-SECOND detector. At first, SECOND detector is improved by replacing voxel grids with 2D grids and adopting multi-dimensional features to detect obstacles, which can reduce the time consumption and ensure the accurate detection of remote obstacles. Then, the first Region Growing algorithm is used to cluster the undetected and non-empty grids, which can detect obstacles outside the training set. At last, the second Region Growing algorithm is used to refine the detection results of obstacles with larger volume and multi-obstacles grids, and complete the obstacle detection. Through testing in our extracted urban dataset and KITTI dataset, it is verified that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and can accurately achieve obstacle detection. The average duration of the entire process is about 50ms.

Keywords

• Intelligent vehicles
• LIDAR
• Grid-SECOND
• region growing
• obstacle detection